With cuts to higher education funding and the prospect of fee deregulation being some of the most maligned aspects of the May federal budget, it was surprising that as much attention was being paid to Australia’s institutes of higher learning as is usually paid to our schools, hospitals and transport.

After months of debate, negotiation and much hand-wringing, the Senate finally voted down the bill in parliament’s last sitting week, only to have the bill’s champion, Education Minister Christopher Pyne, reintroduce it the very next day.

So, is another tumultuous year on the horizon in higher education? We’ll have to wait and see.

Prestigious universities tended to be in support of fee deregulation - because they would have the pricing power in a marketised system.AAP

Paying for education was an important focus this year. We closely examined private schooling and whether the cost pays off. We found public school kids do better at university than private school kids with the same tertiary entrance score, and post-university employment prospects and wages were much the same.

We didn’t only look at public and private schools, though. There’s been an increased interest in doing education differently, so we looked at alternative forms of education and options outside of public, private and Catholic schools.

While thinking about different ways of doing things, our authors challenged what we thought we knew works in education. Misty Adoniou asked if we should scrap homework altogether, and Rebecca English asked if parents should stop punishing and rewarding their kids, and instead teach them to be good just for the sake of it.

And finally, we realise the education section has bombarded you with close-ups of this man all year. So here we pay homage to that with a few of our favourites. We’ve called it “The Many Faces of Pyne”: